These Are the People in Our Neighborhood

Bay Weekly tells you their stories

By Sandra Olivetti Martin

Chesapeake Country has so many denizens, and each has a story. Those stories flood into Bay Weekly. Nowadays most come to us by email, though personal visit, phone, fax, the postal service still add to the flow. Writers with open eyes and noses for news alert us to still more. Our advertising team adds to the volume, bringing us news of the many businesses of Chesapeake Country.
They all come across my desk, on the way to making each week’s paper. Sitting in that catbird seat makes me feel like Mr. Rogers — the genius of late 20th century children’s television. Like him, I know and like my neighborhood, and its people and creatures are all neighbors.
Like Mr. Rogers, I have the splendid job of introducing us all to one another.
Of course each of us knows our own neighborhood. But the human range of intimate knowledge is pretty small. It’s the distance we routinely walk, bike, paddle, cruise or drive. As the circles get larger, they also get less intimate, as experience loses detail to speed and distance. A newspaper like Bay Weekly is a portable little community of sharing, bringing news that touches all our neighborhoods right into your hands and home.
Reading our ads each week is like walking down Chesapeake Country Main Street window shopping. Find something you need, forgot you needed or may indeed need now that you know about it, and you can walk right into the shop, in person, by phone or email.
8 Days a Week opens still more doors — hundreds each week — giving you glimpses of the many things your neighbors are up to and inviting you to join them.
Especially good for young mothers — like I was when I first visited Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — is the calendar feature Kids Time at the Libraries, a weekly listing of all Anne Arundel and Calvert libraries’ programs for children. They’re a wonderful way to get yourself and the kids out of the house and into your neighborhood. I know because they’re good for grandmothers, too, and for child caretakers of all sorts and ages.
Of course libraries aren’t just for kids. 8 Days a Week guides adults and teens to their own special programs each week
Each week, we snatch a few stories from the flow to share with you in more detail. We share our neighborhood with many species, so each week we bring you Creature Feature to keep you in touch with doings in our animal neighbors.
Animals are boon companions to so many of us that we do lots of stories detailing interspecies relations. We feature one of those this week. Chesapeake neighbor Cathryn Freeburger takes us inside the motivations of people like her, who’ll do just about anything to keep an animal safe and sheltered. She is not alone; as her story explains, the network of animal rescuers spreads all across Chesapeake Country.
Other neighbors as just as passionate about playing. The lengths they go to put on plays justify the almost weekly play reviews you read in our pages.
Different strokes for different folks. Each week, we take you into the lives of people who are our neighbors but are not just like us.
Chesapeake Country is diverse. Water shapes our neighborhoods, and fish live in water. Each week Dennis Doyle takes you to that element.
Living in Chesapeake Country makes you want to dig in the dirt. Agriculture is a community heritage that Bay Gardener Dr. Frank Gouin helps you reclaim in his weekly column.
Night is as much a part of our world as day; this time of year, they’re balanced about 50/50. So for all these years J. Alex Knoll writes about our weekly neighbors in the night sky.
An editor of one of the mid-20th century’s many great newspapers called the Chicago Daily News “a daily novel of the city.”
The Chicago Daily News was a big paper. Bay Weekly is more like a weekly novella of Chesapeake Country.
There’s a delicious double layer of truth in those words. Newspapers — and I suppose their multimedia offspring — chronicle life in its moment of freshness, simultaneous with our living it. At the very same time, our stories give shape to raw experience, making a bit of sense out of the speedy flow.
It’s a great job, perfect for a person who loves both knowing what’s new and reading novels.
That’s why I keep reading, and why I keep coming to work. Every day is filled with news. Our neighborhood is big and happening and full of multi-species experience. But none of it’s a story until a storyteller comes along.
And until it has a reader. That’s you. Keep up the good work!